Draft: Subject to Senate
Approval
MINUTES OF THE THREE HUNDRED AND THIRTEENTH
PLENARY SESSION
OF THE UNIVERSITY FACULTY SENATE
OF THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
September 27, 2005
The meeting was called to order by UFS Chair O’Malley at 6:30 p.m. in Room
14-250 of Baruch College. 79 voting
members were present.
Baruch: Present – Freedman, Hill, Myers, Pollard, and Smith. Absent – Martell, and Vora. BMCC: Present – Belknap, Friedman, Martin, Rani, and Roy. Absent – Agwu, and Price. Bronx CC: Present – Asimakopoulos. Absent – Alozie, Durante, and Skinner. Brooklyn: Present – Bell, Bloomfield, Jacobson, Morawski, Rodman, Shapiro, and Tobey. Absent – Antoniello, Cunningham, Viscusi, and Wills. CCNY: Present – Crain, Daglish and Leonard. Absent – Sank. Vacancies – 5. CSI: Present – Cooper, Farkouh, Levine, Petratos, and Alternate Schumann. Absent Klibaner and Yousef. CUNY Law School: Present – McArdle. Absent – Andrews. Vacancy – 1. Graduate School: Present – Baumrin, and Nolan. Absent – King, Lerner, and Orenstein. Hostos CC: Present – August, and Alternate Czarnocha. Vacancies - 3. Hunter: Present – Finder, Kaye, and Matthews. Absent – Doyle, Friedman, Guzzetta, Krishnamachari, McCormick, Sherrill, and Wimberly. Vacancies – 1. John Jay: Present – Brugnola, Kaplowitz, Kubic, Romero, and Alternate Soto-Fernandez. Absent – Caldwell and Kucharski. Kingsborough CC: Present – Barnhart, Farrell, Galvin, Hume, O’Malley, and Ruoff. LaGuardia CC: Present – Beaky, Davidson, Lerman, Mettler, Rushing, Shean, and Alternates Forrester and Green-Anderson. Lehman: Present – Jervis, Kolb, Philipp, and Wilder. Absent – Aronowitz, and Mineka. Medgar Evers: Present – Barker, Hastick and Alternate Stewart. Absent – Daly, and Donohue. NYCCT: Present – Cermele, Dreyer, Hounion, Richardson, and Alternate Pinto. Absent –Horelick, and Karthikeyan. Queens: Present – Bird, Casco, Gonzalez, and Savage. Absent – Brody, Habib, Moore, Tse, and Zevin. Vacancies – 2. Queensborough CC: Present – Barbanel, Hest, Jacobowitz, Pecorino, Weiss, and Alternate Dahbany-Miraglia. Vacancies – 1. York: Present – Divale, Frank, Lewis, and Rosenthal.
Chancellor Goldstein, Executive Vice Chancellor Botman, Vice Chancellor Schaffer, President Waldron, Dean Shepard, Dean Mogulescu, Dean Peterson, Director Otte, and Executive Assistant Cura attended. Others attending were Syd Lefkoe, Barbara Nelson, Greg Matloff, and Bernard Sohmer.
Governance Leaders present: Anderson (BMCC), Baumrin (GSUC), Cooper (CSI), Dreyer (NYCTC), Kaplowitz (John Jay), Leonhard (CCNY), Levine (CSI), Mettler (LaGuardia), Pecorino (QCC), Savage (Queens), and Tobey (Brooklyn). Parliamentarian Andrea McArdle, Executive Director Phipps, Administrative Assistant Pasela, and Secretary Blanchard were also present.
I. Approval of the Agenda: The agenda was adopted as distributed.
II. Approval of the Minutes of May, 2005: The Minutes were adopted as distributed.
III. Reports: (Recorded in Reports &
Deliberations)
A. Chair (oral & written)
B. Chancellor Goldstein.
C. Dean Steve Shepard, School of Journalism. This report was withdrawn to allow time for Vice
Chancellor Botman to introduce plans for a CUNY-on-line B.A completers
degree. The discussion is recorded in
the Reports & Deliberations section.
Dean Shepard will be present at a future plenary.
D. Representatives to Board Committees
IV. Appointment of UFS Standing Committee
Slate: Appended to Minutes.
V. New Business:
A. Panel discussion soliciting
faculty opinion on privacy issues at CUNY.
The panel discussion
was lead by Professors Baumrin (GS), Pecorino (QCC), and Sullivan (JJ) and is
recorded in the Reports & Deliberations section.
B. Resolution to Confer University
Faculty Senator Emeritus on Professor Bernard Sohmer. Professor Martha Bell
presented the resolution to the Senate, and it was adopted unanimously with a
standing ovation and applause.
Resolved, that the University Faculty Senate express its appreciation and
gratitude to Professor Bernard Sohmer upon his retirement from teaching for his
extraordinary dedication to the faculty of The City University of New York by
way of exemplary leadership of The University Faculty Senate, and confer upon
him the honorary title of Distinguished University Faculty Senator Emeritus.
There being no further business the
meeting was adjourned at 9:00 p.m.
Respectfully
submitted,
Bill Phipps
Executive Director
REPORTS AND
DELIBERATIONS OF
THE THREE HUNDRED AND THIRTEENTH PLENARY SESSION OF THE UNIVERSITY FACULTY
SENATE
OF THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
September 27, 2005
Chair Susan O’Malley – Welcome back. We’ll start by having President Kathleen Waldron come in to say hello because she’s responsible for this beautiful place that we’re so happy to be in tonight.
President Kathleen Waldron – Thank you. Just quickly, good evening everyone and welcome to Baruch College. For those of you who have not been in this room before you are now on the 14th floor of the Newman Vertical Campus Building, which as you know opened in 2001, and it’s our pleasure to host you this evening and to make sure that everything is comfortable. I was told that our security would not wrestle you to the ground as you came through. When I became President last year the first memo I received from a faculty member outside of Baruch was related to an unpleasant incident and we’ve changed our policy, so you are quite welcome at Baruch College at any time. That was an easy decision. On that note, welcome and have a good meeting.
V. New Business:
B. Resolution to Confer University Faculty Senator Emeritus on Professor Bernard Sohmer
Chair O’Malley – I will start the meeting with something special. Bernie Sohmer is here tonight, and we have a resolution in thanks for all he has done.
[Resolution is read by Professor Martha Bell.]
Professor Bernard Sohmer – I don’t remember having written such a florid statement, but I thank you for the distinction and I gather I am in a very select group of elder statesman, thank God. The best of luck for all the young ones.
III. Reports:
B. Chancellor Goldstein –It’s a pleasure to always be in your company and it’s good to see you in good spirits, and I commend the Senate for anointing him with that important honor. He’s a very special guy and he deserves all of this accolade, so it’s good to see you.
I’ve been asked by Susan O’Malley if I could take you through a plan that I am going to propose to finance the CUNY Master Plan, and I have done this with a number of groups. Let me give you a little background on this, and I will not burden you with all of the technical issues; there will be plenty of time for you to drill down and see not only the themes but the logic, hopefully, behind some of the recommendations. I start by saying something that I have said to this group over and over again, and that is in my time at this University, there has not been an investment in this University. If you put aside the monies, and they are growing quite substantially now, to support capital construction and design of the new facilities and refurbishing existing facilities, I can’t really stand before you with any sort of clarity or accuracy and say to you that there has been an investment beyond that. There really has not been and so much of the work that collectively we have accomplished over the past few years has largely been a result of reshaping the budget of this University, which is now hovering around $2 billion a year. Some will say that that’s real money, but for a University of this size and stature, it is really a paltry sum. It sounds crazy, but it truly is a paltry sum. What makes matters worse is that the University is obligated by State Law, and I think that’s a good thing, to write a Master Plan, and it’s usually 4 and 5 years by the time we get it done and it goes through the approval process, but it’s in that order of magnitude and it goes in front of the Board Regents for review and approval and the Governor for review and approval. And that’s fine, but what happens is that that Master Plan, which is really a lens on the future of this University, at least the short-run future of 4 to 5 years, literally sits on a shelf in lots of offices and is not funded, and it’s a little crazy that we go through the arduous process, and it is an arduous and involved process, to get the best ideas from this community and say this is what we value, this is what we aspire to accomplish, but this is the amount of money that we’re going to need to get the thing done.
So the Master Plan has never really been funded except in the area of mandatory costs. So let me just take you through how we view the Master Plan and what the challenges are, and the proposal to see if we for the first time can get the Master Plan financed. We will need approximately a half a billion dollars over the next 4 years if we fully fund the Master Plan, and I will bifurcate the Master Plan in the following way: mandatory costs will account for about $300 million of the $500 million that we need; mandatory costs essentially, but it’s not restricted to these three categories, are essentially dominated by collective bargaining increases, fringe benefits and energy costs; and that last category is something that all of us are starting to get seriously concerned about for the reasons that everybody in this room knows, so I don’t need to dwell on that. It is the $200 million that I’d like to reflect on with all of you this evening. That is in my language the true investment that we’re asking the State of New York to embrace to allow us to hire an additional 800 faculty over the next 4 to 5 years; this is in addition to the 900 faculty that we have hired since 1998; this is incremental over the base, not just replacing people. It is for student support, it is for academic support services, it is for instrumentation in our laboratories, it is for all of the things that you purchase, both services and people, that will allow this University to continue to prosper, to grow, and to do the kinds of things that all of us in this room hope to accomplish.
How are we going to finance this $200 million when the history has shown a lack of propensity on behalf of government to take this seriously? Let me tell you a little side story, which really gives you some clarity or sheds some light on why we have seen this as a recurring problem in both CUNY and in SUNY. When the Governor proposes a budget each year there is a theme; I’ve used this metaphor before, it’s a Bach fugue; it’s exactly the same set of notes, and it goes like this: let’s assault TAP. TAP is a voucher program that was largely established in the State of New York at the behest of the private institutions. The fact is that a dominant number of private institutions would probably close their doors today were it not for TAP. TAP is scrip that students and residents of New York State can use to purchase credits towards tuition at private universities, private colleges, proprietary institutions, and certainly the public sector with CUNY and SUNY. All of us want TAP to be fully funded or at least robustly funded because it gives access to our institutions. So we all join together in a fury to try to undo what the Governors have traditionally done; and it’s not just the current Governor; we’ve seen this played out before. And typically, not always, we’ve succeeded. We’ve succeeded because we have the block of the private institutions and CUNY and SUNY working together, the Legislature joins hands with us and lo and behold, at the end of the day TAP is restored. The Legislature says, all right, we’ve now taken care of CUNY and SUNY, now let’s get on to something else. And we have always been left with an empty bag with respect to funding the programmatic needs, the investment that we need for this University.
I am going to propose, or I have proposed, a five part plan that, if fully funded, requires a lot of action on the part of each of us in this room and throughout this University in order to get this done. First and foremost we must not let the State of New York off the hook. We have to say to the State of New York that it must provide support for investment in the University, and we’re going to work as hard as we can to get that part of the $200 million that we need to fully fund the programmatic aspect of the Master Plan from the State of New York. Now we do this every year but this year, because of the way in which we’re rolling this out, we’re saying we want you to be a part of a compact of different constituencies that are all going to be providing support until we get this Master Plan funded. Just to make the arithmetic easy, if for example we’re looking at 4 fiscal years prospectively and we just say we need a uniform distribution of these dollars, we need about $50 million in the upcoming budget that we will eventually get to support the programmatic aspects of this Master Plan. So part one of this compact is that we must get money from the State of New York, and let’s assume that we will; we shall see.
The second part is philanthropy. There does not exist a University of any stature in the United States today, both public or private, that does not establish a revenue stream at the beginning of the fiscal year that obligates money that is raised by whomever, the President or the Board or the faculty, generating for the University; every single University is doing this and they’ve been doing it for a while; this University has never done it. Part of my motivation when I came here about establishing a campaign for the University was knowing that if we are to move forward, this University has to start getting in lock step with other places that are accelerating ahead of us in the ability to aim really high and get the kinds of things for the faculty and the students that we need to make a great university. We have a $1.2 billion target. Sounds like a lot of money but, let me tell you, for a University of this size it’s a modest target. But I’m also pleased to tell you that up to this point in time, -- we announced the campaign a year ago this November -- we have booked in close to $620 million towards that $1.2 billion target. And I think one of the reasons that we have been collectively as successful thus far is that there is a sense in the community, and I’m using a very expansive definition of the community, of people who were showing their support for the University, a perception that this is a University that is worthy of investment. Some of our Presidents are now bringing in some significant amounts of money and I think it’s a good sign that people are saying we believe in this University and we believe that it should get our support. I’m going to ask the Presidents that each of them will be allocating a very modest part of the money that they are generating each year over the life of the Master Plan towards the $50 million target each year. It’s not an even playing field. Baruch College today, and this may shock many of you in this audience, obligates from money that they raise about $14 million a year in support of the operations of this college. There is nobody in the University that even comes close but there are other colleges that are starting to make significant progress and they will start utilizing some of these dollars in support of the things that are appropriate. Nobody wants to write a check and say we’re going to let the State off the hook. We’re not asking for money to operate the University, we’re asking for money to add to the money that is provided right now, the real investment, and we’re going to disaggregate those categories of investment from the Master Plan. And the Master Plan, as you know, is very broad based, and each campus has its own needs and its own objectives in programmatic themes for their institutions and they should make the decision how those dollars are used; so that’s the second part.
The third part is by far the most subtle and in my mind the most interesting, and it goes something like this: Our Presidents know well, and certainly the Finance Committee of this body knows well, that there are very few degrees of freedom that a President can exercise year to year because most of the costs are fixed costs or recurring costs. And when you pull out the fixed costs and the recurring costs and you look at what’s left, there is not a lot of money, and that money has been dwindling over the years, to start making moves that the faculty may want, that the students may want, that the administration may want; there’s just not that kind of investment that is flexible enough for Presidents to exercise that kind of objective. What we need to do, and what we are thinking through-- when I say we, I’m thinking through with members of the Chancellery, and I’ve asked Susan O’Malley to engage this body in a very legitimate way – are the tools that I can give the Presidents to enable them to start using their budgets in a much more flexible way. Now let me give you two examples. One is pretty straightforward, we’ve invoked this before, and it’s had mixed success; some campuses did it in a way that really helped them to reshape and others did very predictable kinds of things, very safe things, and as a result of it really didn’t enable themselves to jump into areas that they would like, and that’s the Early Retirement Initiative. We’re going to see if we can invoke another Early Retirement Initiative this year. Obviously it’s to require approval by both the Governor and the State Legislature, but it’s something that I think makes sense for us because there are people we can create incentives for to retire, and then use those dollars to replenish areas of the campus that need replenishing. So that’s easy. We’ve done this, we know how to do this, and it’s a question of whether we can get the legislation and whether we can get the various political forces to stand behind us and to get it done. But let’s suppose that we are able to do that. Let me give you a second idea.
All of you know that the boundaries that are separating disciplines today are highly blurred. When most of us here were studying as undergraduates we had very clearly defined silos. You studied mathematics, you studied biology, you studied economics, you studied English, you studied a foreign language, you studied psychology, very clearly defined silos, and there was virtually little interaction between two silos or among a group of silos; people went and they did their work and they got their credentials and they went on with their lives. But today universities are operating in very different ways. You go into laboratories today, and I’ve often used this as an example, and you ask the question which one is the biologist, which one is the computer scientist, which one is the mathematical modeler, and which one could be a plasma physicist. Oftentimes you can’t come up with the right answer because they’re all working on similar problems that are very complex. Mathematicians call them hard problems, and they are bringing their own perspectives, their own particular training, but yet they blur that training in a way that enables them to see clarity in ways their individual training could not demonstrate. And this is becoming the theme and a characteristic rather than the exception on our campuses. New disciplines at some of the great universities in the United States today have names that a number of us had never heard before because they didn’t exist. And the question is why aren’t we as a university doing this? I sit in on the CAPPR Committee, Committee on Academic Program and Research; that’s where new academic departments are presented to the Board for review. And I will stand before you today and say in the 6 years that I have been chancellor there has been a paltry amount of new academic departments, and the ones that are being formed are not certainly in the mainstream of the new developments say in the areas of science. And I thought about this, why are we different than most other places, why are we different from the University of Michigan or Indiana University, or University of Texas at Austin, or Berkeley, or Harvard, or Yale? Why are we saying these institutions creating new areas of study and attracting faculty to fill those departments and create knowledge, and so many of these departments are much more interdisciplinary than they were from our own experience. The reason is very simple: they got the dough. They have the courses and they have the money to support people who come in to a Provost and say, I have a great idea and I need X millions of dollars to do this, and if you can be persuasive and you are dogged enough, something will happen. Well it’s not going to happen at this University that way because we just don’t have the money but we can suggest ways of creating some of those departments on some of our campuses by identifying faculties that we have right now at our University, the mathematician who’s really interested in financial modeling, the biologist who’s really interested in mathematical modeling, the physical chemist who really is doing work very different from some of the colleagues in his department but looks very much like people in some other department. We can create incentives for faculty on our campuses to be pulled from the departments that they are in now if they want to participate in this, create a critical mass or cluster, and form a department of bio-informatics for example. We have the people; we can create people to do work in statistics, and we have it at one institution now and it’s a very small discipline but we have people around this University that would love to be in such a department and work with their colleagues; we have sociologists, we have mathematicians, we have computer scientists that would love to come together and work in an area that they have a communality of interest in. This doesn’t really cost too much money; what it does is require assiduousness in how we rethink personnel practices to ensure that people keep their seniority, to ensure that they have the protection of tenure, and all of that. These are doable things that could be a very creative way for us to reshape some of what our campuses and our faculty would like to do, but by virtue of not having the investment we really can’t do it. We could also certainly invest in those new departments and we must do something like this in this University. We are too stagnant, and we must start thinking about broadening the base of what this University is capable of engaging in. So those are just two ideas and I ask you as faculty governance leaders in the University to help us think through, what are some other tools that you can think of to help us start reshaping, not forcing anybody to do anything but responding to requests that I get; I get requests from faculty on a regular basis, why can’t we create a department of so and so on such and such campus? And I feel a sense of despair that I can’t really do it because I don’t have the funds necessary to do it, but if I invested a bit of money and had some way of reshaping the academic budgets we might be able to accomplish that; so that’s number three.
Number four is what we have been calling productivity and efficiencies. At the end of the day, productivity and efficiencies are largely dominated by one thing: do you spend money centrally or do you spend money de-centrally? If you want to buy some stuff and nine campuses need that stuff do we say to each of the nine campuses, do it on your own or let’s do it collectively? By making those judgments, those conjoins, we have demonstrated that we’ve been able to save $10-20 million a year in procurement of services and also in spending patterns, and we’re going to continue to do that so that we stretch the dollar.
The last is tuition. Our students have experienced a very bizarre approach to tuition here at this University; either they have very high spikes of 25-30% or they have a flat line, and depending upon when you enter the stream you either get hit with real vengeance or you get away with a quiet and tranquil fee schedule that really hasn’t changed. It’s really a crazy way to do tuition. Tuition is going to continue to grow. Would I like to have free tuition? Sure. Will we ever have free tuition? It’s a non-starter, that’s the world that we’re in, and public higher education today is confronting political realities that are resulting in government pulling dollars out of the system rather than putting money into the system. If we had a tuition plan that was very modest, modest being 3-4%, not 30% or 20%, but if we had a very modest tuition schedule with the covenant that no student that would be placed in harm’s way financially would suffer the consequences, that we will take care of them, but that other students would pay us a small amount of money, we would accomplish two things: one, we would put financial aid and operating aid in better balance, we would be able to transform, if you will, some financial aid into operating aid, because basically 35% of our students are not paying anything at all and there is sufficient room in the TAP schedule so that if there is a small increase, TAP is going to pay for it and then if we get the money back, which is the end of the story, we’ve converted financial aid into operating aid. We need to try to get operating aid and financial aid into better balance because what we do is make it easier for the student to get in, which is a good thing to do and we ought to continue to do that as much as we can, but once they’re in we don’t have the money to give them the kind of experience that all of us in this room would like us to do. So the last part of the compact is that if we have a small tuition increase, secure those students that are in harm’s way, and the State agrees that if we collect a small amount of money it comes back to each campus, with the following conditions. The President has a panel of people that consists of faculty, and I would expect them to be faculty governance leaders and others, administrators and students, and those students are going to be an equal partner; if Hunter College as a result of this small tuition increase gets $15 million, Hunter College files a plan that is a joint plan from all of these different constituencies and the money is going to be spent in that particular way. What we accomplish here is a compact among the University, friends of the University, the State of New York, and students, all saying that investment in the University is important, and unless we get this investment we, collectively, in this University are just not going to be able to move ahead. I think we have to do something like this in order to give the University the kind of resources that it needs. I’m not going to be able to take questions, I’d love to stay here, but I’m late to give a speech that I have to get uptown to do. So I apologize, but I promised Susan I would present this to you today. I will come back. Take as many questions as you want but I’m going to ask you to help me think through how we can get some of this done. Thank you very much.
Chair O’Malley – We have a really loaded agenda tonight. I want to make an announcement from the Disability Committee because it’s a bit of good news. September 6, 2005, the City University received word that we, a group from the Disabilities Committee, have been awarded just under a million dollars over the next 3 years to implement a project called People Tech. The project will bring together the people and the technology required to guarantee a high quality education for students with disabilities through the CUNY system. The CUNY Assistive Technology project at Queens College, the multi-media center for Deaf and Hard of Hearing at the College of Staten Island, and the Computer Center for Visually Impaired People at Baruch College will jointly run the project. The project will develop and disseminate tools and strategies to ensure that online courses are accessible, especially basic courses, science, and math; assessment tools, both standard and non-standard, are usable by all CUNY students; and strategies are available to facilitate classroom teaching of students with learning and/or sensory disabilities. The primary mechanism for ensuring our success will be a paid faculty access core that takes a leading role in implementing these objectives. I couldn’t be more pleased. Congratulations for doing this.
The agenda has Dean Steve Shepard at 7:15, but, EVC Botman, do you want to address the faculty quickly? Who has to leave earlier, EVC Botman or Dean Shepard?
Vice-Chancellor Selma Botman – Good evening. I am very pleased to be here today. Susan asked me to talk about on-line education at CUNY and I wanted to talk with you about an idea that a number of us have about establishing a Baccalaureate degree for degree completers at the City University of New York. This is an idea I have been talking with my staff about and also with faculty across the University. From the work we have done, it is clear that there are tens of thousands of people in the metropolitan New York City area who have some college work behind them, but because of life, work, or family responsibilities, they cannot actually come to a campus to receive a CUNY education. We believe that CUNY should go to these people and offer them the kind of education they want. I think an on-line Baccalaureate degree is fundamentally mission driven. This University prides itself on access and opportunity for students in the metropolitan New York area. An on-line degree would very much be in line with this mission. So we’ve begun to talk about how we might deliver an online degree for Baccalaureate students, where would it be housed, what would it look like, and we realized that fundamentally this has to be participatory and faculty has to be engaged in helping us develop courses and conceptualize a degree that is coherent and rigorous and is up to the standards of other CUNY Baccalaureate programs. So we wondered, how would this degree be structured and where would it be housed, and actually we considered a number of options. Should it be from a single campus? Well, a single campus didn’t seem able to deliver the number of courses needed for this degree. What we realized though in the thinking is that CUNY is already engaged in on-line instruction, that every semester at CUNY campuses literally hundreds of on-line asynchronous courses are offered. When we realized it wasn’t going to work from a single campus and no single campus expressed any particular interest in doing a Baccalaureate degree in Liberal Studies and General Studies, we thought about bringing several campuses together. Again, we weren’t able to think that a number of campuses were sufficiently interested in doing this, so I raised the possibility of delivering this on-line Baccalaureate for degree completers with CUNY faculty and other adjunct faculty as needed through the School of Professional Studies.
I have with me here tonight John Mogulescu, Brian Peterson, and George Otte. George Otte has single-handedly, I think, really been a force for the power of online instruction for students and also has engaged hundreds of faculty in teaching with technology, and so his contributions to this effort were always seen as absolutely fundamental, absolutely critical. When I raised the idea of SPS hosting this Baccalaureate degree, John and Brian nearly had a collective heart attack because they wondered what your reaction and others’ reaction would be, and I began to wonder, why? And it came to me that CUNY has a particular history that’s not common in the United States higher education, and that is that as a general matter in most universities in America you have a regular population in what some people call the day school, even though we know that classes are on weekends and in the evenings and during the day; to have this day school population taking 4-credit courses is very typical. But side-by-side, in very much a parallel way, you have a continuing education operation that also offers courses for credit and degrees for credit. CUNY doesn’t have this mode. Continuing education operations at CUNY do not offer courses for credit, and so the flash of SPS offering degrees was novel to many people. I think one of the biggest problems with SPS is that it hasn’t told its story to faculty and staff across the campuses of the University. SPS is offering quality certificate programs, quality courses delivered by faculty, designed by faculty, to students in New York City, and it is an operation that we all should be proud of. I think this is an ideal location to host the Baccalaureate degree.
And I will say one other point, that we are now engaged in thinking about how CUNY faculty might become faculty within SPS where we may establish joint appointments between CUNY campuses and SPS, so that we are ensured of faculty input into the courses we develop and deliver. So I’m here to answer any questions and to tell you that I’m very excited about this initiative. I’m hoping it will be up and running by the fall of 2006 when we will admit our first class of on-line Baccalaureate students. I see this degree as targeting a population of people who are mature students, who have between 30 and 90 credits, who will come to CUNY on-line to learn and also to be credentialed so that they will really have access to the professional careers that so many of them seek. I don’t know what I’ve left out and maybe in the questions and answers, more information will emerge, and I’ll also call upon George and Brian and John.
Chair O’Malley – OK, do line up and ask some questions, but remember we have a long agenda, and it does seem to me that next plenary we’re going to have to look at this issue in great depth, but let’s start asking questions now.
Professor Bill Crain (Psychology, City College) – Since the Chancellor didn’t take questions on vital issues, we must have a whole lot of extra time. You say that faculty would be engaged in the design of the curriculum. According to the Bylaws the faculty doesn’t help, the faculty is responsible for the curricula. / Vice Chancellor Botman – Yes, I mean this is a distinction without a difference. Faculty will design courses. / Professor Crain – But also the credits toward the degree and all the other things that go with not just design the courses but graduation and so forth, they have to be in charge of all that according to the Bylaws. Second, with face-to-face school, the older students both contribute and benefit more than others in my experience, and they’re the ones who get the most out of and contribute the most to the old traditional face-to-face classroom dialogue with other human beings. I think it’s a dehumanized experiment and I wish you wouldn’t do it. / Vice Chancellor – Let me answer that, Bill, can I call you Bill? / Professor Crain – You can call me that face-to-face. On the Internet it’s always Professor Crain. / Vice Chancellor – I’ll remember that the next time we have an e-mail exchange. I agree that face-to-face is a [tape turned over] way to teach. And the on-line degree for degree completers is not intended to be in place of the face-to-face instruction. I want to say one thing about face-to-face instruction, which is really separate from the on-line degree. I think sometimes we tend to romanticize face-to-face instruction. If you’re sitting in a class of 150 people, how touchy feely is it with your instructor, how likely is it that you’re engaging with your instructor? I think we have to be realistic that there’s all kinds of face-to-face instruction and that it is not going away, nor do we want it to go away. This is the same kind of rigorous program, just delivered differently; it’s a different pedagogy than what exists face-to-face. And the presumption that learning doesn’t go on in an on-line fashion or that communication doesn’t go on, I think is not to understand the medium. So just philosophically I don’t agree. / Professor Crain – Maybe some others will.
Professor Jane Matthews (Hunter College) – In the 1970s I was the Chair of the Evening Session Council. We had what was called a School of General Studies, so this model that other universities had we also had until 80th Street decided we were a single session and the admissions and the testing and all of that was imposed on everybody. When we had a School of General Studies that was for the older students and the degree completers, and it could be individualized and tailored. I think we should learn some lessons from what was done. The distance learning technology is new and we better learn the limitations on that, restart it at Hunter with courses for administration and supervision for advanced certificates for teachers. And this kind of thing, they learned, had restrictions. There are people for whom this works well, but you have to investigate before you go into it. So investigate what’s being done with distance learning, investigate what has been done, and maybe not be too quick to throw something out. / Vice Chancellor Botman – I think one of the advantages of being late to the game, and CUNY is late to the game in terms of on-line degrees, is that you can do exactly as you say, which is to learn from the mistakes and also the successes of other universities engaged in this pedagogy. So to be sure, one of the tasks and challenges ahead of us is to learn from those who have done this before us so that we don’t replicate the errors made.
Professor Cooper (History, College of Staten Island) – What would you do if you were confronted with near universal opposition from the faculty and the Presidents and the campuses to this idea? / Vice Chancellor Botman – I don’t expect it to happen. Because the initial feedback we’re getting, Sandi, is that there are faculty who are eager to teach on-line and that there are faculty and administrators who want to serve a broader population than we are currently serving, so I don’t expect it. / Professor Cooper – You don’t. According to the Bylaws of the Board of Trustees and to the law settlement of 1996 initiatives like this are supposed to be initiated with discussions, not presented to faculty. From my understanding of what I’m listening to, you have decided the fait accompli and we are being asked to condone it and to support it. I have no problem with an occasional colleague of mine doing online teaching, there are two of them I know who do it because they don’t want to travel an hour and a half, but I do have a significant difficulty with a degree for people who have already dropped out of colleges for a varieties of reasons offered by a unit of the University which was originally created, according to the documents we were given, to give no degrees. They then began to give certificates and now we’re talking about Baccalaureates. This is a kind of creep which occurs during the summer at administrative central without faculty participation. / Vice Chancellor – Sandi, if I took things personally, which I don’t, I’d be insulted by your comments. But let me just say that I believe that ideas bubble up from a whole lot of sources. Whether they bubble up from administrators or they bubble up from faculty, they can be credited as good ideas. So I don’t think any single population has a monopoly on good or right ideas. The School of Professional Studies is a unit that I think can host the degree. That is what I think should happen. In terms of the content of the degree, the courses that we will offer, we are inviting faculty to participate and to help us develop this. So to suggest that everything is already sewn up and complete is to give us more credit than you should because we don’t have it completed; we are in the process of thinking through what this degree should look like and we are talking to lots of different constituencies to invite their participation into the degree. So those people who want to participate will participate and those people who do not want to participate will not. On-line education is not for everyone, on-line teaching is not for everyone and is not going to be imposed.
Professor Leslie Jacobson (Health and Nutrition Sciences, Brooklyn College) – You had said earlier that the colleges were not interested in doing on-line programs. It was my understanding that several of them already have gone a long way, and as you said, hundreds of courses are being offered. Wouldn’t it be wise to take these courses and to unite them in such a way to furnish a Bachelor’s degree that would be given through the Graduate Center of CUNY but to use the courses that are already on the books with the faculty who have been accepted by the various campuses instead of starting something de novo. / Vice Chancellor Botman – We hope to do that. We hope as we go to faculty and say let’s develop this degree, let’s figure out what the content of that degree should look like, let’s look at what already exists, and invite faculty who are already teaching on-line to work with us on this degree. So it is precisely building on what exists, trying to understand what the gaps are, creating new courses to fill the gaps. / Professor Jacobson – Well, it is my understanding that there are one or two colleges who are pretty close to doing total on-line degrees. / Vice Chancellor – Where are they? Tell me where the campuses are? / Professor Jacobson – I was told that Lehman College has gone a long way. / Vice Chancellor – Lehman College is very interested in on-line education. The President is very interested in it. I don’t know if there’s anyone from Lehman College here, but I can tell you that the first degree that Lehman College wants to offer is an on-line Baccalaureate in nursing, and I know that because I’m supporting financially that effort. So where is the degree? Susan asked me to explain what that is. For the nursing degree on-line there’s a presumption that students already have the RN, so they’ve done their clinical practice in the first two years of college, and the second two years they’re doing science and upper division courses that do not require clinical practice. / Professor Jacobson – It’s the other way around; they generally take the first two years of science and then they do clinical practice. / Vice Chancellor Botman – The students that would come to the on-line program -- City Tech is also thinking of a comparable program -- would have their RN.
Professor Michael Barnhart (History, Philosophy and Political Science, Kingsborough Community College) – I wanted to pursue a different kind of question actually. We on the Academic Policy Committee, tonight, saw a draft of some aspects of this proposal, and there were two things really…/ Vice Chancellor Botman – That’s interesting, I didn’t think we had a draft. / Professor Barnhart – Well, it’s not really a draft, we heard about some of the features of it, some of what you’ve mentioned tonight. But I had some concerns about it and some members of the committee expressed some concerns about it, in terms of the initiation of this proposal, and then the oversight at the School of Professional Studies. In regard to the initiation you said we are moving ahead on this but I was wondering to what extent this is being faculty-driven and faculty-led in terms of the initiation of it, and whether the initiation of this is something that is going to be, as it were, sort of taken over by faculty, if that’s what you’re encouraging. / Vice Chancellor Botman – Can we take one thing at a time? I’m a little perplexed because there are people who may wear a number of hats who are members of the faculty. So this “we/they” dichotomy is perplexing to me. I probably shouldn’t name names, but having George Otte involved in this operation is very critical to me as an administrator/faculty member, and I want to say that there are academics who are administrators, there are administrators who are faculty as well. So the dichotomy is both unfair and inaccurate. / Professor Barnhart – I didn’t use the “we/they,” you said “we,” and I was wondering who “we” was primarily. I’m very glad George is involve and I have a lot of respect for George and have served on committees with George, but the thing is that there is a difference in role between administration and faculty and, as was pointed out before, the faculty have a Bylaw responsibility for curriculum and its development and so on. Actually, this body, the Faculty Senate, is in fact your sort of intermediary with the faculty. I know that you’ve been in discussions with the Chair of our group, but I’m Chair of the Academic Policy Committee, and this is the first time I heard about it, and I was surprised because I thought that if in fact it was going to involve faculty as initiators in this process, I would have heard about it. I’m not out to point fingers; I’m just wondering to what extent this is going to be faculty-driven. / Vice Chancellor Botman– We welcome faculty at every stage and recognize the contributions faculty will make in creating this degree, providing the content, and teaching. We’ve begun to talk to people. We started talking with people who were a part of what we call the SCORE Committee last semester who tended to be some faculty, some IT types, and my intention was to come here and speak to faculty here. We’re also prepared to come to the campuses and talk to people at the campuses. We have to start somewhere. It would be rather difficult to start talking to faculty on a campus without talking at the central meeting places. So the idea that faculty wouldn’t be involved is unfounded, and I’m not sure why the expectation would be such? / Professor Barnhart – That wasn’t my expectation. The second question has to do with its being overseen and housed at the School of Professional Studies. The School of Professional Studies has a governing board but it’s rather small and you’re talking about an enormous program potentially, and typically these things are overseen by a number of different committees at a college, an Instruction Committee, Curriculum Committee, things like that, and I was wondering what your plans were in terms of that sort of oversight. / Vice Chancellor Botman – That’s a very important question. You’re right, the School of Professional Studies has a governing board; 30% of the members are appointed by the University Faculty Senate. The School of Professional Studies will create a Curriculum Committee and we’ll create the appropriate committees to ensure that the work gets done in a way that reflects the way it gets done on a campus. / Professor Barnhart – And do you have any idea what the size of such a committee would be? / Vice Chancellor Botman – I haven’t even thought about it. Do you have any ideas? / Professor Barnhart – I would think quite a number. It would depend on the size of the program; it sounds like this is going to be a very large program, so I would think you would need a very large number. / Vice Chancellor Botman – I hope it is. I hope you’re right.
Professor Emily Anderson (Borough of Manhattan Community College) – My understanding is that you’re trying to reach a cohort of students that aren’t currently served by the university, so you’re talking about mature students who have work experience and who have college credits. I guess I have a couple of comments and then a question. Students who have been out of school for a period of time--I’m not so sure that offering them distance learning is the way to go, and that’s because of my experience of teaching students of all ages, and there is a big disconnect between someone who’s been out of school for 5-6 years and not really up to par in terms of academics. So I’m thinking that you might want to consider doing it both ways, having some face-to-face and having some distance learning. My second question is kind of related to that too, would you be thinking about the possibility of giving these students life experience credit as a part of this new idea? / Vice Chancellor Botman – We will leave open now the question of whether we should have some hybrid courses, whether we should give them some face-to-face experience in this. This is a discussion we need to have. Similarly, the discussion on what kind of credit we can give students. / Professor Anderson – The University as a whole does not provide for…/ Vice Chancellor Botman –I don’t know. There are some small programs that might do that. We do not see this program, at this embryonic stage, as giving life credit or work credit to students. As it evolves, who knows? But I think your first point is an important one that we should consider. / Professor Anderson – And, in terms of the structure, why not have it structured under CUNY BA as just another way of getting a CUNY BA rather than creating…/ Vice Chancellor Botman – That question has been asked; it’s a very important question. I looked very carefully at the CUNY BA as a structure, and as you know the CUNY BA is set up so that students can elect to do an individual major whereby they find courses across the CUNY campuses that fit into their major and also their interests. They choose courses that happen to be offered in any one semester. The BA for degree completers has to have a coherent number of courses that are available every semester for students, and that kind of regularity and the guarantee that faculty who teach a course this semester would teach it another semester at the BA for degree completers is absent from the CUNY BA. A faculty member might teach the Russian Revolution this semester and might teach Stalinism the second semester. We might decide that we need to have core courses that we can guarantee are taught every semester. If we work through the CUNY BA we don’t have that guarantee because faculty keep changing what they teach. / Professor Anderson – Wouldn’t that possibility happen if it were an on-line course as well? / Vice Chancellor Botman – No, because we would guarantee that the courses needed for the degree would be offered every semester. We would have the ability to ensure the faculty who teach in the on-line program teach as an overload, not teaching as part of their work load, would teach the courses that are required for the major and for the degree. / Professor Anderson – I hear what you’re saying but it still sounds that you’re reinventing something that is already in place or maybe just needs a little…/ Vice Chancellor Botman – The CUNY BA is a small program that couldn’t handle the number of people who may in fact matriculate into the on-line BA, and the faculty members that we will want to hire will have to be dedicated to teaching the courses that we need every semester. It’s not a question of reinventing the wheel; the CUNY BA is not a model that will work for this particular program.
Professor Alfred Levine (Engineering Science and Physics, College of Staten Island) – I am speaking as Chair of the UFS budget committee and so of course my question relates to budget. The fact sheet that was handed out lists as one of the plusses, it is a moneymaker. / Chair Susan O’Malley – Selma doesn’t know that I did a list trying to give facts, and then I did plusses and I did minuses. One of the plusses was it is a moneymaker. / Vice Chancellor Botman – Can I have a copy of it? We hope that this degree and this program will be enormously successful. From our research we know that there are literally tens of thousands of people in New York City who have left CUNY alone in the last 5 years. Half of this whole population have left in good academic standing, and have not entered a Baccalaureate program. We think if we can attract students back to CUNY and students who have not been at all members of the CUNY community into this program it will generate resources, and we hope that those resources can, one, support doctoral education, and find a way to go back to the campuses. / Professor Levine – Let me follow up on this. When Chancellor Goldstein introduced the School of Professional Studies a few years ago he used the words “this will be an off balance sheet operation” and indicated that he would not be requesting tax-levy money to support. So I take it that you will not request tax-levy money to be diverted from the traditional campuses for this program. Is that correct? /Vice Chancellor Botman– Well, there’s a lot of seed money that goes into all kinds of programs at the University and this degree will have to be seeded, and so we’ll find the resources to do this. / Professor Levine – But the goal is to have it be self-sufficient and if it is not it will be closed. / Vice Chancellor Botman – Let’s be honest, there’s no intention to create a program that drains resources from the campuses of the University, there’s no intention of creating a program that hurts the City University of New York. So if we can all at least operate from a position of civility and respect, I think we can accomplish something.
Professor Vasilias Petratos (College of Staten Island) – When you came on last spring I wanted to get on the microphone and welcome you, but then I was way back in line and I never made it to it. What’s happening in the trenches is that we have very large classes, that 55-70% of our courses are taught by adjuncts who are very able but cannot devote the time. Therefore the University is in crisis and here it seems we’re looking for things that are exotic, to put in the mildest way, if we take the plusses and minuses that you mentioned this evening. We heard the colleague before saying that you present us with a fait accompli; it’s a fait accompli and done, that’s it, period. The faculty should have decided on all this and we’re told that the faculty will “participate.” We heard before from another colleague, Professor Crain, that the faculty in fact determines, shapes the curriculum and so on and so forth; we’re not doing anything like this. We heard from the Chancellor a year or two ago, Al said before, that the School of Professional Studies will never grant a BA, and here it is. Have you discussed this with the Professional Staff Congress? I’m also a member of the Union and the head of my chapter at my college; I’ve never heard of any discussion with the PSC; the PSC is to be ignored. Now we hear about the budget. Your time, the time of your staff, here we’re allocating resources from the University to something unknown, exotic, not yet decided, we don’t know where we’re going, and we’re allocating several hundred thousand dollars, seed money, non-seed money, and we take resources from other places, and I tell you what the suggestion is in the trenches. It’s not OK to sit and make nice decisions about things that will flourish 25 years from now when I have to teach 55, 60, 70 students in a class and when I have in the academic department about 55-60% of my courses taught by adjuncts. Then we have the generic questions of whether people that will be getting this degree do their own work or something else will happen? Then we have the issue of people coming back, you know what happens when people come back; we look at the transcripts to see where have they been, are the courses already an anachronism that they took 25-30 years ago, we try then to give them advisement as to where to go, and so on and so forth. So these people will come now and get a degree by getting 30 credits without any other faculty participation. / Vice Chancellor Botman – You’re getting yourself unnecessarily worked up. / Professor Petratos – No, no, no. That’s a way of saying I don’t accept anything you said because you’re worked up. This is absolutely ludicrous. / Vice Chancellor Botman – I don’t even remember the beginning of your question. Again, we have to begin the conversation somewhere. We came here, we came to the SCORE Committee, the group of faculty and administrators who worked on a committee on on-line education last spring. We are prepared and are eager to talk to people across the campuses. We have to start somewhere; we came here. So we have not, to answer your question, spoken with the PSC. It is not because we don’t want to, intend to, it’s just we have not done so as yet. / Professor Petratos – But you’re starting next year, the PSC is here…/ Chair O’Malley – Drawing resources from the campuses is a legitimate question that has got to be addressed. / Vice Chancellor Botman – I just wanted to say one point. There are universities across the United States that have come to the conclusion that not offering on-line education actually draws students away from the day school, if you’ll forgive the term, and that’s because students are looking for technology-instructed education and looking for universities that are able to teach on-line, teach face-to-face. So there are universities that are going into on-line education for continuing education students as a way to maintain their base of day students. So I just say that to you as well, and I frankly am sorry because I forgot some of the other questions that you’ve raised. / Professor Petratos – […] in the future I’m sure you want to implement it. / Vice Chancellor Botman – I hope so. / Chair O’Malley – We have the whole privacy policy discussion, so I would like this to go quickly.
Professor Phil Pecorino (Queensborough Community College) – I already have a written statement in general about the whole project, but to assist the situation a bit…One of the things that makes it kind of aggravating or difficult is that you’re presenting a concept and a program at the same time with very little specificity, so people are open to construe it in the worst possible fashions. How soon before we see in some degree of detail in writing what are the faculty charged with doing, what the responsibilities would be, what other range of resources and support services and where would that come from? In other words, when would we have something in writing with some degree of detail so we’ll know actually what we’re all talking about? / Vice Chancellor Botman – You’re absolutely right and we will very soon have a document that we will circulate, but I just want to step back a minute and say this is almost a situation where you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t, because we come here with this idea and it is said it’s a fait accompli, no one has engaged the faculty, and then you say, tell us how it’s going to be in detail. What we’re saying is we do have a concept but we want to work with faculty to put flesh on that concept. We have a conceptual framework, we should write it down, you’re absolutely right, and that can serve as the basis for a concrete discussion, but to say that it’s all fleshed out in our minds, and you know this, is really not the case. So the reason why we didn’t come with a document that is fleshed out is because we need the input of faculty to help us create the courses and the degree. / Professor Pecorino – If the faculty give you an estimate of what the support services will cost, you’ll respond to that honestly? / Vice Chancellor Botman – When someone asked earlier about the governing structure of SPS and will there be a curriculum committee, one of the important components will be a committee that is focused on student services so that we understand very clearly, and we know some of this from other universities that have been doing this for a long time, so we at CUNY are clear about what the academic support services are, what the library resources will be, what we need to do in student support. So we will absolutely pay attention to that. Again, the goal is to create the conditions for student success. The goal is to be responsive to New York City and to the people who would like to continue their educations but cannot do so within the constraints of the traditional mode. / Professor Pecorino – Thank you.
Professor Manawendra Roy (Borough of Manhattan Community College) – Our experience is we’ve developed some courses in technology, we have spent the money, and we are not getting the students, so we cancelled the classes. The second problem is going to be security. And the third problem you are going to have, just like outsourcing, we’ll see after a few years, we’ll spend the money here but for the less money people are going to do the training for the same course from India, because with the same amount I’m paying a fee here the same thing I’m going to do and teach from India. So many universities are doing their outsourcing from India. / Vice Chancellor Botman – Have you read Tom Friedman’s new book The World is Flat? / Professor Roy – No, I didn’t. / Vice Chancellor Botman – You’d enjoy it. It talks a lot about this very topic. / Professor Roy – The question is what we are going to see after 5 years; it’s going to be a big hole, just like we are doing in the South Korea nowadays. / Vice Chancellor Botman – Let me respond. This is the second reference to security issues. CUNY’s already facing these issues. There are hundreds of asynchronous on-line courses at this University already delivered by full-time faculty at this University. So this is not an on-line issue generic to this degree. There are security issues that we face all the time with our students; it’s students writing papers in face-to-face classes, students taking on-line courses. So this is not an issue that is sui generis to this on-line degree. The second point is will we in 5 years outsource this to people internationally. I hope this degree is taught by CUNY faculty and I’d rather see CUNY faculty teaching this program than any other faculty. So is the intention to outsource? No. Will we need to supplement CUNY faculty with people who are not on our payroll? I’m sure we will, just as we do now, just as we use adjunct faculty now, we will use adjunct faculty. But there’s no philosophical difference.
Professor Bill Divale (York College) – I think this is a perfect case of shooting the messenger. I want to thank you for coming here. I’m very much interested in on-line, I’ve been teaching on-line completely for the last 3 years. The Vice Chancellor Botman came up with the initial idea, the initial charge, but many of us on the campuses have been thinking about on-line degrees for a long time, but the nature of it is you’ve got a few professors at this campus, a few at that campus, there isn’t a critical mass at a particular school to create a whole program. So this is a way of uniting faculty from many different schools, almost like the Graduate School model. And George and Curtis have led a committee; there’ve been 2 representatives from every campus, we’ve met all last semester, we started meeting this semester. Have some confidence in your faculty. If you know nothing about on-line teaching, then don’t automatically assume it doesn’t work. We are light-years behind all the major universities in this country in terms of on-line programs. / Unidentified – Were you talking of the SCORE report? / Professor Divale – Yes. / Chair O’Malley – Yes, they all have the SCORE report. However we didn’t have a UFS representative on the committee I don’t believe. / Unidentified – off mic – Phil …He’s over there. / Chair –I didn’t know he was our UFS representative. / Professor Divale – The point is that this is a tremendous area of growth. All the studies indicate that in this century this is going to be the largest area of growth in higher education and we are not paying attention to it. The only problem I have with anything you said is that this model of using faculty teaching as overloads or as adjuncts will not work, that it really must be the faculty as part of their regular teaching load, many joint appointments, and when they teach a course it is open to regular CUNY students elsewhere as well as the special college students, and then it will work. But otherwise we’re going to have 90% adjunct teaching and it will not be quality and I know you want quality. / Vice Chancellor Botman – Thank you very much.
Professor Martha Bell (SEEK, Brooklyn College) – I received earlier last week a chart from OIRA, the Office of Institutional Research and Assessment, a report on statistics from various campuses, and it went down alphabetically, Baruch, Brooklyn etc., and under York there was School of Professional Studies. It was given to me at a meeting, and it was listed as though it were an undergraduate college; the top of the form said undergraduate headcount. So somebody thinks that this is a college, and my sense of this as I’ve been reading e-mails flying around about this and other things, that it’s being constituted as a college such as Empire State, not as a degree. You keep saying this is a degree; this is more like a college and program that’s going to have to have a faculty and a governance. SPS was a continuing ed operation with certificates, but this is a real college, and it’s got to have a curriculum and everything else. So I’ve been calling around looking at the Empire model, which has been very successful, determining that most of the students are not SUNY students -- they come from all across the country. A friend of mine runs the program at Chaminade in Honolulu, at which she keeps begging me to teach; 90% of their students are mainland students. This thing knows no borders and I think if we’re getting into such a thing and we envision this, we’ve really got to address it not as some little degree program here but take it seriously as the University birthing a college and going through the right governance procedures, the correct thing. For example, the State Legislature requires any new undergraduate college to have a SEEK program. I’m not saying I want to put a SEEK program on-line but the Legislature requires it, so that we’ve got to really talk about what it is, and I think this creature is more like a college than a degree program. / Vice Chancellor Botman – We will take your advice, Martha, and give it very, very deep thought and consideration. I have to say that in my mind the model is the continuing education unit, which in my last life in Massachusetts offered and conferred certificates and degrees. The continuing education units regularly created and delivered on-line and face-to-face degrees. These programs were taught by both UMass faculty and by adjunct faculty and that’s the model I’m using. Do we want to have rigor and do we want this program to be as successful and as well thought out as any of the other programs across the University? Of course, and any suggestions that faculty make to us to help that process will be appreciated and deeply considered.
Professor Philipp (Chemistry, Lehman College) Bill Crain mentioned that curricular initiatives are a prerogative of the faculty and this Senate. In our proposal for the Master Plan, we proposed a curricular initiative, which was a program in Pharmacy, yet the University has, to my knowledge, never even formally responded to that initiative, and I’m just curious why initiatives that come from 80th Street get big play, get a response and get a reaction but initiatives that come formally from the Senate, do not. But you don’t have to respond to that because you were not here. / Vice Chancellor Botman – I just have to say that this was my time because I have not seen a formal proposal in Pharmacy. / Professor Philipp – The real question, the one I’d like to answer, is you mentioned that one of the problems of having an on-line program run for the college was that faculty keep on changing what’s in their courses. / Vice Chancellor Botman – No, they keep changing the courses. / Professor Philipp – Right, but I though that was one of the glories of undergraduate education. / Vice Chancellor Botman – You’re conflating two issues. I’m saying that any degree on-line has to have a coherent stable of courses and in the CUNY BA model students choose courses as they appear in the catalog, not because there is this promise of the following 10 will be available in the next 4 semesters. So you’re conflating two things completely. / Professor Philipp – We have that same problem in departments where we have degree programs run through departments and those issues are dealt with by peer pressure and P&B appointment of people to courses. Of course, the courses do and have to change with time because the knowledge base in the disciplines changes with time but if there’s going to be pressure to have a constancy in courses who’s going to apply that pressure if it’s not a departmental P&B committee and a departmental faculty, which apparently, as far as I can tell, don’t exist here. / Vice Chancellor Botman – Well, there will be faculty involved in course development, in thinking through the degree, in course delivery, in overseeing this degree. So in fact faculty will be involved, as will the governing board of the School of Professional Studies. So there would be many levels of involvement, the governing board as well as other faculty with committees. It can’t be that you create a degree and you have courses offered in an episodic way. This degree will be more focused, more targeted, and students will have much less choice available to them than that which exists on campuses because it will have a smaller faculty, the number of students will be smaller, and so it will be a much tighter array of courses. That was the point. / George Otte – We’re not talking about constancy and course content. I want to consider quality control and peer review that exists in any college but we’re talking about on-line courses and there is not in this University at the present time anything, besides some grant money that I’m running out of, to ensure that these courses are offered on a regular basis, and that’s the issue. We’re talking about a small body of on-line courses and we have to ensure that they’re there but they disappear when people get hired away and they go on sabbatical; we have to find a way of making sure that those courses are offered on a regular basis, that’s it. It’s the issue of generating on-line courses, that there has to be faculty for.
Chair O’Malley – I want to thank Executive Vice Chancellor Botman. She might also like to announce the distinguished lecture series that she is starting.
Vice Chancellor Botman – We’re doing a distinguished lecture series, my office in conjunction with individual campuses. The inaugural lecture will be Wednesday, October 26 at the Graduate Center. Dr. Elizabeth Thompson from the University of Virginia will be speaking about women’s rights in the Middle East, so I invite you all at 4 o’clock to the Graduate Center. We have this listed as Proshansky Auditorium but the room has actually been changed, so I think it’s going to be in the English Department Lounge. We would welcome your presence at this talk.
V. New Business:
Chair O’Malley – Now we’re going to spend some time on the proposed privacy policy. Please, this is incredibly important, wait till you hear what these people are going to say before you leave. We’ll only have a go at it for about 20 more minutes, but it’s critical. So if Harold Sullivan, Phil Pecorino and Stefan Baumrin would come up to the table. As you know, Dean Shepard left because he had another appointment. Executive Vice Chancellor Botman asked if she could speak, and it seemed to me of critical importance. We need to decide what our position is going to be on the online B.A. Degree Completers Program, but I think we’ll do that at the next plenary. We need to think about this and circulate some proposals. But let’s start the discussion about the lack of privacy policy.
Professor Sandi Cooper (History, College of Staten Island) – Susan, could I just say something for one minute. We have to think very clearly about the difference between a degree offered by a non-existent college and on-line courses, which may or may not be useful and may or may not exist everywhere. But the notion of instituting what in effect is a back door new campus in CUNY when we don’t have enough money to pay our bills now strikes me as the focus of what this body should […]. / Chair O’Malley – We could discuss some of this online, but I think perhaps the next plenary should be devoted to this, a discussion among ourselves of this issue and then decide what position we want to take: whether we want to withdraw or whether we want to have conditions in our participation, or what we want to do; and I don’t know the answer to that.
Professor Harold Sullivan (John Jay College of Criminal Justice) – I’m Chair of the Government Department and Chair of the Council of Chairs at John Jay. I think there really isn’t time for me to give a history. I think we really wanted to hear from you, your concerns about computer use privacy, these kinds of questions. The history as we started this at John Jay, the Vice Chancellor told us we couldn’t have a campus only policy. They set up a task force, we were placed on the task force by the University Faculty Senate to represent the faculty, we have had meetings, and we started from very far apart. I think the three of us had an attitude that basically without a search warrant there’s no right to intrude into our computers, etc. The administration’s position is that they have to protect the interest of the institution, they have to protect people from abuses, sexual harassment over the Internet, whatever kind of subject you want to get into. Last summer I agreed to work on a draft that the Vice Chancellor submitted to try to make it more acceptable. I sent that back to him the other day, we’d worked together I must say on this, and we have not heard a response yet. But I sent back, there was only a draft, and I’m not even committed to it because in a sense my attitude is that our original position was probably the correct one. I don’t think we’re going to get it, so the question is what can we get. The question for you, I guess, is what are your concerns to educate us on this question of privacy in using your computers, using campus communications etc.?
Professor Pecorino (Queensborough Community College) – Vice Chancellor Schaffer has described a practice; some people sometimes use the word policy, but it’s a practice. They instructed the heads of all of our academic units that if they receive a report that they think warrants their going into the office, the file cabinet, their purse, the PDA, the e-mail, the hard drive of a faculty member, that they are to report that to the General Counsel and Vice Chancellor for Legal Affairs. After consultation with the Office of the General Counsel and Vice Chancellor for Legal Affairs, the President may then make the decision to tell local campus officials to go and take a look, go and make copies, whatever. We know that that practice may be observed, but we also know of instances where it’s not observed and a decision is made locally and faculty, staff, find out that somebody has come in and made a copy of their hard drive or taken their computer or checked on their e-mail. So the idea of the University appears to be that if they believe they have sufficient warrant, I don’t mean in the legal sense but it includes a warrant or some kind of legal activity, that they can go in on University property and observe or make copies of anything, the contents of your wallet if you leave it on your desk, your purse, anything. Your personal property if it’s on this property of the University they can take a look at it, so there is no exclusion as to what they might examine. That is a rather disturbing thing to a lot of faculty to learn of this. The Vice Chancellor observes on the one hand, “Faculty should know that they have no expectation of privacy” but on the other hand when we say, “When we report to the faculty we’ll tell them that this is what it is,” and he says, “Oh, don’t do that, that will be very upsetting.” In my logic class, I would say that the ideas supporting these responses are inconsistent. So we go into this because the University wanted a policy with regard to electronic communication and we find out the University has got no basic policy concerning privacy to begin with. We also extend it to confidentiality. There’s a good deal of what many of us do that we must extend that pledge in order to do what we do, particularly people working with human subjects under grants. There is a lot of sensitive activity that goes on throughout the University, including activity on search committees where we pledge confidentiality to candidates and the letters of recommendation. So the University’s practice seems to threaten a good deal of what faculty do, to the point that some faculty have already begun separating their activities for which they want privacy and confidentiality off the premises of the University, trying to avoid using University resources in doing these things. It’s sort of counter productive but some have begun to do that. Also, we have something called the Research Foundation and when they receive grants involving human beings there are federal and other regulations where they must honor confidentiality. So we’ve got a University practice that says you don’t have it, you can’t give it, and then we take grants and things and we work on them on University property with University resources that offers and extends confidentiality. So it’s an area that needs addressing in a consistent and comprehensive fashion, and our position has been that faculty are not in an employer/employee relationship, and there’s a good deal of what we are expected to do and responsible to do, advisement, counseling, research, search committee work for which privacy and confidentiality are essential, not to mention our academic research for which privacy is an important matter until we’re ready to publish it. So our position has been when faculty are doing the things that faculty are supposed to do they should have the right to privacy and confidentiality. If someone accuses faculty of doing things that they are not supposed to be doing as faculty, selling antiques or running a kiddie porn operation, operating with drugs, then OK, faculty need to be involved in making the decision that this is not faculty activity and there’s sufficient evidence to establish that perhaps they should go in and take a look. / Unidentified –What is the status at other large public institutions? / Professor Pecorino – Not good. The AAUP, we’ve been in contact with them as well, thinks we should pursue the line we have been taking; our line is that because we’re faculty, we have academic freedom, that’s the AAUP, and that entitles us to privacy and confidentiality in order to accomplish what we have that freedom to accomplish and do what we do as faculty. Now there is nowhere that we know of where this has been secured by any kind of written, binding document. There are university policies galore across the country that provide for exceptional cases under which faculty privacy may be invaded and there are a variety of models for who makes that decision. We’re trying to take a strong position that it ought to be a faculty decision because we’re faculty members and we know what faculty is supposed to be doing and consider the evidence when maybe we’re not doing that. Any place in the country where there’s anything more than what they want to offer us, it’s in the contract through collective bargaining.
Professor Philipp (Chemistry, Lehman College)– About 10 years ago I served on the committee of the Graduate Center dealing with policies concerning e-mail and Internet use and the policy that was adopted at the time was that e-mail was confidential. Now I don’t know where that document is, it’s a long time ago, but people on the panel are suggesting that the non-existent new University policy supersedes whatever the campus may have done in the past. / Professor Baumrin – The answer to that is yes. But it’s news to us that we already have a policy. I’d love to see it too because it’s been their claim that there isn’t a policy or that there is a policy and that the policy that there is is that they have access to everything, but that’s also not written and it’s not been agreed to and so on. Let me just flesh out the question of where we are. We are very soft people, this committee, and we’re willing to compromise, and one version of our compromise is a faculty committee which will decide if and when the University would have permission to invade the privacy of a faculty member; the second position is a faculty committee with an administrator on it should make the same set of decisions, and the third weakest position is a committee which has a majority of faculty on it. One of the questions we want you to address yourself to is whether or not there is some alternative that we haven’t broached to ourselves that we ought to consider very seriously.
Professor Harold Sullivan (Government, John Jay College) -- There has been some movement on the Vice Chancellor’s part since this started. At the beginning he wouldn’t acknowledge the idea that faculty should have even a role in this. He promised that they would never do anything, “we’re not going to be spying on you, don’t worry.” He has moved toward us a little bit accepting a faculty role, and the latest version that he’s received from us is that there would be a committee where the University Faculty Senate President, four other faculty members chosen by the Executive Committee of the Faculty Senate, two administrators, and there could not be an intrusion without the majority of the faculty members agreeing to it. We want you know your response. What do you feel about this?
Unidentified – I guess I need some clarity. Are you looking for input in terms of developing what this policy should be, under what circumstances…/ Professor Pecorino– How many of you thought that you had a reasonable expectation for privacy and confidentiality when you were doing all the range of things you do as a member of the faculty? We’d like to hear, because the Vice Chancellor thinks that you’ve never had such an expectation; our claim is of course we did, out of just simple politeness. How many of you expected that, that they wouldn’t come in without your permission? The second question is how many of you would like to have that, now that you’ve discovered that you didn’t, so we’re working out how achieve that moving from not having what you thought you had to getting you what you thought you had and what you need. / Professor Baumrin – Let me make this one point clear. I’ve been on this body a long time. If we agree to anything, it will be issued in our name. Our presence on this task force is compromising the faculty’s briefing its own rights. So we need to know where to draw the line, we need to know when to walk out, we need to know when to say no, because it’s truly just up to us. You may all think what are you talking about? Have them decide in any way shape or form? What, are you crazy? in which case we’ll stop now.
Unidentified – I think that we should have a say about that and faculty prerogatives should have precedence. Administration is certainly going to be involved in this but certainly I believe that we should make the recommendation as to under what circumstances and who should have access to whatever it is that they might have access to. If someone is accused of being an axe murderer or whatever the charge might be, is that sufficient grounds for someone? So those are the kinds of details that you need to find out. Under what circumstances should they be able to infringe upon our privacy?
Professor Sandi Cooper (History, College of Staten Island) – The students have enormous protection in a variety of ways in which student-faculty disciplinary committees were set up. The faculty under the contract with the Union have a variety of protections. We have a long tradition of taking some cognizance of people’s rights, and it seems to me that this falls in that tradition but just because the technology is new, the morality is old. And I honestly don’t understand where they’re coming from. I think they’re really losing it. They keep issuing all kinds of rules for how we must be careful accusing a student of plagiarism and we have to prove this and get that piece of evidence, and you can’t give an F if there’s this possibility. We once had a Vice Chancellor who was terrified of any student bringing a lawsuit – therefore, none of us could fail anybody. This has gone from the sublime to the totally ridiculous. I have no problem with some investigation of an axe murderer; kiddie porn is also not one of my favorites; but if one of my colleagues is having an affair over the e-mail with someone else I don’t give a hoot and I don’t think they should either. Can we come up with a policy from the University of X which looks good and stick with it since someone else has obviously struggled through this? / Professor Pecorino– We’ve looked and they’ve supplied examples to us, we’ve supplied examples to them, but we still have to work out what you want us to work out. It’s a matter, I think, of legality rather than morality. We’ve heard them say, and I jumped on it, we can do this. I said just because you can do it, doesn’t mean you should do it. Faculty of a university are not the same as employees. When they proposed their first version, I said this is a wonderful policy except that you’ve got faculty in the institution. They’re trying to protect, I think, the needs of the University and its image against some possible things like those horrible things that you don’t like and I don’t like, and they’re using law. And you’re saying look at the positive side, look at all the things that we do for which we need to have a reasonable assurance that we’re not going to have people looking over our shoulders. So far we haven’t convinced them that that’s enough. / Professor Cooper – The way we do with all other issues in our governance is we have committees under the charter of each college. I don’t care if there’s two administrators and six faculty, whatever the balance is, that probably ought to be left up to the campus, and this is the position you can argue for because we have precedent for it. / Professor Baumrin – You’re dealing with a completely rational situation. The reason it came about that the central administration, particularly Vice Chancellor Schaffer, got hysterical is because John Jay governance has the policy which ensured that the faculty member’s right to privacy would not be readily invaded and he can’t deal with that. He intellectually cannot deal with that as a single off balance case, so it’s got to be wiped out. /Professor Sullivan - But he came to John Jay and he told us, sorry, you can’t do it but we’ll set up the University policy, that’s how the task force got started. But there is one point which makes us a little different from other areas, and that is the technology. As the Vice Chancellor points out, our computers are linked to a central server at 57th Street. “A John Jay policy can’t control the server at 57th Street,” he said. There’s some truth to that, so in a way we do need a University policy to make sure that nothing’s going on centrally.
Professor Phil Leonhard (City College) – Three points. You’ve done some nice clear thinking and very clear and solid presentation. Thank you. Second point, University policy; should it just be a privacy policy for the matters of interest to the faculty? Should a University policy not be a policy that deals with administrators, students and all other members of the University community, although we end up with several privacy policies as a result of going at it alone. Third point, if somebody’s going to respond and make a decision about whether you can go into somebody’s computer or office or wallet or whatever, the case might be a committee is not going to be able to make such a decision in any kind of efficient or effective way. By the time they sit down to make up their minds the wallet’s going to be someplace else. It seems to me that this might be an occasion to begin thinking about a University-level ombuds person who would be in a position with suitable training to make those decisions as they’re needed.
Professor David Bloomfield (Brooklyn College) – Two matters that haven’t been raised. One seems to be what types of activities are they talking about. Most of the activities that people have spoken about tonight are criminal activities and therefore there is a process already in place whereby the police could get a warrant and invade any premises for a specific search based on criminal activity. So that’s one question that I think needs to be addressed, what types of activities are they talking about? The second is what would trigger some investigation. At a minimum it seems to me that you should insist that there be no systematic administrative invasion of electronic files, which as you indicate exist on University servers, so there’s really nothing that would keep a college or central from systematically looking through e-mails, looking through URLs that faculty were browsing through in order to elicit information about wrongdoing. So are they only taking complaints or are they thinking about looking through people’s files basically spontaneously, and I think you need to address that issue as well. / Professor Baumrin – Their nightmare scenario, administrators always govern by nightmare scenarios, is that suppose by accident, trying to fix a computer or site they stumble onto child pornography being sold by an Assistant Professor along with some package of drugs. They think that under those circumstances they would be entitled to pursue that accidental discovery and possibly pursue from it other sites for other individuals and so on. We have not taken the position that they can do anything at all with that or not, because the nightmare scenario is that they get the information by accident and what they’ve got is a criminal wrongdoing. / Professor Bloomfield – But what about finding a lot of family photos traveling via e-mail and saying this is a misappropriation of public property by using server space. Is anybody talking about it? / Professor Sullivan –One thing they put in their policy is a recognition that there will be incidental use for personal purposes on University computers. He said it’s stupid that the current policy says you’re not allowed to use it for personal things and everybody knows we do it just like we use our telephones. But there’s another issue they’re concerned about, which is not as serious as the kiddie porn thing but it’s still a problem I think they’re concerned about, and that is legal liability. So think of Napster for example. Let’s say we’re downloading in our offices music illegally from the Internet onto the University computers; they feel that they are legally liable; it’s like an employer would be in another setting or high schools, and colleges have already been held liable when students do that in dorms. So therefore if they have a sense that’s going on, do they have a right to intrude and to investigate and to stop it or block it or whatever? So these are really difficult issues. I can understand they do have at least some problems they have to confront, such as legal liability. / Professor Pecorino – I don’t know if you know how significant it is about legal liability. It’s called a triggering event in the law. When someone files a notice in the court somewhere and this institution will become aware of it because of the process known as discovery, then any and all pertinent materials to that action, whatever it might be, the University must safeguard because the warrant or request or summons or subpoenas may come forward and under those circumstances we understand the institution cannot oppose that. / Professor Bloomfield – In fact I used to practice with the Vice Chancellor, so I understand that. They may have as much problem with finding out this stuff more than we do about this, so that’s why I’m concerned about this kind of systematic snooping. I think that maybe we can sort of come together at least on that level “don’t ask, don’t tell.” / Professor Pecorino –I keep reinforcing the notion that we must look beyond the electronics. If someone’s cleaning a faculty member’s office and finds in the pail kiddie porn or a harassing note, or whatever, it’s the same as if they had seen it on an e-mail being transmitted from one campus or office to another. The idea is, is this information sufficient to allow them, the authorities of the institution, to go and take a look at anything and everything they think related to it? Who makes that decision? Kiddie porn at John Jay--a forensic psychologist might be doing a study about that, or the Hunter School of Social Work may be interviewing prostitutes, child pornographers, etc. Who makes the decision that this accidental discovery is the first entry into a major potential embarrassment for the University? And a very curious thing is covered here; if one of our members gets caught up in the press for having done some pretty outrageous speaking, freedom of speech, the University will always claim “Well, we had no knowledge of this,” and that’s the academic freedom of the faculty member. If they, on the other hand, say that it is their right to engage in periodic surveillance then people would say “You should have known that faculty member was a psychopath or whatever, one with those crazy neo-Nazi ideas, what do you mean you didn’t know?” So the University can on the one hand say, “Well, you have academic freedom and that means we don’t go watching everything you’re doing,” and on the other hand they can say “We could if we wanted to,” because then people would hold them accountable, why weren’t you watching? Did you know the first time he said something like this? Why weren’t you watching every e-mail they ever sent from that point on? / Professor Baumrin – Harold’s original position is more attractive to me as the days go by because if we could get them to wipe their hands of the whole thing, maybe tell the faculty you’re on your own, you’re liable for everything you do etc. then that might end this. But I’m not sure if we let them have any access whatsoever that that isn’t giving them more than a foot in the door; it gives them everything.
Professor Orlanda Brugnola (John Jay College of Criminal Justice) – I heard you use a formulation earlier in this discussion which troubles me because it has a history within CUNY, and that was a notion that faculty are not in an employee-employer relationship. And yet I think it was around the time of the Jefferies situation at City College that the University tried to use a precedent which involved a hospital employee who had said unfavorable things about a hospital administrator to another employee. The other employee had reported this to whomever, and the hospital fired the employee who had made those disparaging remarks and that firing was upheld on appeal. So I encourage you not to rest easy on the notion that we have a different relationship. By the way, if you want to look that up, you have to misspell Jefferies’ name.
Professor Campbell Daglish (Media Communication Arts, City College) – My question is, who is “they,” who are the authority that decided through accidental discovery that something they have found justifies such an investigation? / Professor Pecorino – In practice, the head of the unit at which this event took place is supposed to be informed, that would be the Provost or the President. He then is to make a direct communication to the Office of Legal Affairs, the Vice Chancellor, communicate what has occurred and what is thought to be needed to be done, and then the Vice Chancellor will consult with the President or whoever is on campus and the decision will be made whether or not to go and take a look, make copies, whatever. / Professor Daglish – So my follow-up question then would be to whoever they are, the authorities. It seems like, and you mentioned this before, there is this sublime contradiction going on. On the one hand we have academic freedom, for which we work very hard to get tenure and we spend our entire lives getting here to have this academic freedom in the classroom, and then on the other hand we have this Patriot Act overview that the people works one way, and that is what are you doing with the academic freedom? And they, the Provost and whoever is in charge, can then decide on whether that academic freedom is going to pass a Patriot Act type of decision. / Professor Baumrin – This is one of the few times that we have the power, and the power is to go off the University’s grid, to take the research and shut it down; that costs them whatever it is, $30-40 million in overhead; they’re afraid to lose that; they’re afraid to have us go off the grid. I wouldn’t trust these people if they swore they would never invade my privacy; I don’t want them to see my correspondence with Sandi Cooper. It may be in a couple of weeks that we say “No, this is not satisfactory.” We’re perfectly well aware we spent our whole life working for academic freedom, draping ourselves in it, and this guy is going to take it away? Not on my watch! But does the faculty share that view? You’re representing the faculty of the University on this. And if we say, if your representatives on the taskforce say we won’t go along with this, then we won’t go along with it. So that’s why we want to know what you think.
Unidentified – First of all I want to applaud what you’re doing. We do support you. Academic Freedom is critical, and that leads me to my comment. This is a broader issue than just CUNY. At a minimum you should press to have AAUP examine this as an academic freedom issue because we are not the only school facing this, and we have an obligation to our profession to raise this issue on a national scale, so I would hope that you would do that. / Professor Pecorino – We have communicated with them, we have received responses on our position paper on the website, and you’ll see their position papers on this; their recommendation is for faculty involvement in the decision where faculty privacy is concerned. And their key individuals are hoping that we can achieve something here under the auspices of academic freedom; particularly at this time in the University, I think it would be a good idea if we did that. I’m the optimistic one. I’m thinking that perhaps we can work this out where we get acknowledged as being faculty, and that that means something, and that privacy and confidentiality are needed --the assurance for us to do these things that we must do, that it is our responsibility is to do.
Professor Sullivan –This task force is dominated by administrators; it’s just the three of us and there are two college Presidents, there are how many Vice Chancellors, and then there’s IT people-- I don’t know if they’re just staff to the committee or what. / Unidentified – They’re legal counsel. / Professor Sullivan – So I don’t think it will come down to a vote anyway, unless we get the Vice Chancellor to accept our position. I think our bottom line absolutely has to be that when it comes to intrusions in the faculty, there has to be a faculty majority on the committee and a majority of the faculty have to approve. By the way, a question someone asked before about staff, yes, staff and students have rights, too, but it’s still a different issue. Staff are in a position of employees. What if the staff member is spending all day on the Internet looking at porn sites and not doing his work in the library or whatever? They do have different interests there, but they don’t have a supervisory interest over us, the power over us in the same sense.
Professor Frances Ruoff (Kingsborough Community College) – I worked with corporations for years and when you’re on a certain level you have to sign a contract and an agreement and if I worked for them they owned it, and it was upfront. And yes, I was an employee at the corporation. I don’t know where we ever signed our right away here, when we became employees of CUNY, if that’s the way they’re looking at us. We are not staff, we are faculty, and I do resent, as you do too, being equated with staff members; it is a unique position and if they want us to function as such, then let them present us with a contract or something so we sign away our rights the way I did for a corporation. If I was working for a Wall Street firm and they came in and said you’re fired, they have rights to everything in my computer. That is a given that I’m working for them; that is not the same case.
Professor Jeff Hest (Queensborough Community College) – I am very deeply concerned about the proliferation of big brother in my life. I’m sure you’re all aware of the cameras that are watching us all over the city, all over the campuses. My latest incursion has been one of the classes I teach a CLT set up a camera, and I’m a rather emphatic lecturer and occasionally I’m off color and it’s for a purpose and it gets my point across. I said to him I do not want to be on your files, this is an invasion of the way I want to talk to my kids and the way my kids want to listen to me. I had to go to my chair and he said there’s nothing he can do because ostensibly this camera is to make sure that some of the equipment in the room doesn’t walk out. I’m going to walk out because I think this is horrible. But I have a suggestion. I think one way we may start to inform the rest of the faculty is to create a questionnaire, it doesn’t have to be very lengthy, but let’s take their pulse on each campus and maybe it should be a uniform questionnaire and get a sense of the way people feel about this issue, because I don’t think that I abdicated any of my personal rights when I agreed to teach at Queensborough; it’s just not right. Thank you. / Professor Pecorino – Jeff, is that camera making a recording or is it just live feed for somebody to observe? / Professor Hest – It’s making recordings, going right onto a hard drive. / Professor Pecorino – OK, you’ve got the CBA to cover you. No one can observe your teaching unless they fulfill certain procedural safeguards and steps and since the existence of that tape constitutes a possibility of somebody looking at it, your peers, your department Chair, the Provost, whoever, that would be a violation, and the holding on to it constitutes perhaps a file on you and your teaching; that’s against the provision, so I would pursue it through the collective bargaining agreement. / Professor Hest – Thank you, Phil.
Professor Lenore Beaky (English, LaGuardia Community College) – You asked us what we thought, so just speaking for myself I agree with everything that’s been said-- Harold’s description of the minimum required being a body where the majority is faculty, although maybe one administrator would be permissible. I think that’s the bottom line and I think that, whatever the process is, if you wind up with nothing or with no faculty or with one faculty member with an array of administrators, you should walk out figuratively or literally and say we will not accept this, we do not acquiesce, we do not agree.
Chair O’Malley – Meeting’s adjourned. Thank you so much.